Enterprise Mobility — Are You Ready For The Ride?

My colleague Melissa Parrish recently posted how perpetual connectivity will change how we experience the world. I read this and couldn’t help but get excited about the endless mobile possibilities — but I can see how enterprise leaders are filled with an equal amount of trepidation. Consumer mobile devices create countless new opportunities to engage your customers, employees, and business partners at a level never before seen. As Melissa points out, this will change nearly every facet of how your business operates. Here are the areas that I’m excited about:

Enterprise architectures will change from a three-tier model to a four-tier model that incorporates an aggregation/data transformation tier. This will allow existing enterprise infrastructures to react to the new mobile demands on performance and scalability while allowing the enterprise to migrate existing services (public and private) to a cloud-based service-oriented offering.

Successful mobile strategies include four key areas: mobile delivery, cloud, social, and big data. The service tier in the new four-tier model will not only federate internal services for mobile consumption but will naturally extend to include third-party services. This statement will cause security leads to block my blog from being accessed within your company, but don't fret: new security architectures (zero-trust, among others) are being developed with exactly this service-level interaction in mind.

The way you develop software must change, and analytics will become your best friend in this transformation. Mobile devices know more about your users than their spouses and close friends do, and the sensors that are being used today are just the tip of the iceberg. Become familiar with the analytics available to parse all of this “big data.” React to the available rapid feedback loops and deliver software updates on a monthly cadence instead of an annual/biannual one. With the proper focus and metrics, you’ll do less work and deliver solutions at light speed compared with your competition.

Embrace this opportunity to let your employees dream and enable a corporate spirit of innovation. Follow Google’s lead in hiring Ray Kurzweil and embrace dreamers. We are seeing digital disruption change every industry on the planet. Uber, Instagram, and Hipmunk weren’t created by industrial think tanks, but by people that knew they could do things better. The next big idea for your industry is being discussed within your (often virtual) hallways.

Mobile presents limitless game-changing opportunities; these opportunities come with an equal set of business challenges. I’m thrilled to spend the coming year working with our clients and researching how we turn these challenges into mobile successes. What areas are you excited/concerned about with mobile? Let me know your thoughts via email, Twitter, or in the comments here. If you’ve already been successful in this mobile transformation, I want to hear that too, so please reach out.

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